Information in most media applications is organized in hierarchical structures, for example, typical online book stores have shopping categories of book->science-fiction/non-fiction, while scientific papers and movie subtitles are organized in a structure of paragraph, sentence, word and characters; video data is described as scenes, shots, frames, blocks and pixels.
However, these hierarchical structures are not unified or standardized. FIG. 1A shows a goods taxonomy of Amazon, and FIG. 1B shows a goods taxonomy of Yahoo! Shopping. As shown in FIG. 1A and FIG. 1B, the “Magazines” is a second-level category in Amazon while a first-level item in Yahoo!. Further, some item in the one structure (e.g., “Kindle books”) does not exist in the other. The structural differences may become challenging for applications that need to access items of both taxonomies.
The disclosed method and apparatus are directed to solve one or more problems set forth above and other problems.